"We got this jerky sub. she don't know a thing and she's trying to teach it."

Bel Kaufman Education See all quotes by Bel Kaufman →

React to this quote

More by Bel Kaufman

“In Memory of Those Who Died Waiting for the Bell”

“With me they get a solid foundation, the disciplines of learning. In my class they don't get away with hot air discussions and exchanging their opinions and describing their experiences. What opinions can they have? What have they experienced? What do they know? That's an affront! They learn what I know.”

“I had used my sense of humor; I had called it proportion, perspective. But perspective is distance.”

“Mythology is studied in the school system because most of us come from it.”

“One of my students had written wistfully of a dream-school that would have "windows with trees in them.”

“A teacher is frequently the only adult in the pupil's environment who treats him with respect.”

Resonant Thoughts

"I cannot see the war as historians see it. Those clever fellows study all the facts and they see the war as a large thing, one of the biggest events in the legend of the man, something general, involv…"

— William Saroyan

Literature1908–1981

#war

"There's a proverb that you can't teach old dogs new tricks. But all I can say is that any senior man who is incapable of assimilating a working knowledge of all the latest and most up-to-date gadgets …"

— Arthur Rostron

Military1869–1940

#knowledge

"This firing is the outrageous act of a president trying to protect one of his most loyal supporters, the secretary of state, from accountability... I have learned that the Office of the Inspector Gene…"

— Steve Linick

Politics1963

#knowledge

"And at times already I feel old and broken.. .To succeed one must have ambition, and ambition seems to me absurd. What will come of it I don't know ; I would like above all things to be less of a burd…"

— Vincent van Gogh

Art1853–1890

#knowledge